That light cannot be known directly is expressed in contemporary terms by Peter Russell. When speaking of the light of consciousness, he asserts:

Although all we ever see is light, paradoxically, we never know light directly. The light that strikes the eye is known only through the energy it releases. This energy is translated into a visual imagery in the mind, and that image seems to be composed of light—but that light is a quality of mind. We never know the light itself.

Russell is speaking from a scientific viewpoint, but the fact that we can never know light itself is helpful in appreciating the working of boundless compassion. When the light of compassion illuminates our existence, it reveals our self-delusions. Hiroyuki Itsuki ... describes this as follows:

We cannot know that we are illuminated by a great light simply by looking up into the sky. But if we lower our heads and look down at our feet we can clearly see the long, dark shadow that stretches out from us. We know that the darker and blacker that shadow is, the brighter the light that shines upon us.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.

V. Woolf

Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.

Italo Calvino

Why didn't she try collecting something? It didn't matter what. She would find it gave an interest to life, and there was no end to the little curiosities one could easily pick up.

Henry James

contact

evencleveland (at) gmail.com

elsewhere

*Please note: this blog contains no sponsored links; free goods or services are politely declined. However, I do like to hear about new artists, books, bands, products and shops, so send along an email. Reader emails are always welcome.